Three Poems by Rushing Pittman

For a long time I’m unhappy then I’m fine …

I’m fuller than any moon.
I’m made of cobalt hearts.
I’m everything inside the multitude of another.
Here I am inside my kitchen peeling an apple.
The apple takes up the entire room.
Wonderful living with you and seeing you.
No, I let you sleep.
Or why we love or what love is.
I read a list of things that can go wrong.
My new microwave large and white.
When we’re old, we’ll be old.
Bumping into one another.
Sudden light, sudden sun.
I used to be afraid of miracles.
So fast I don’t know the type.
And all the softness with them.
When I was a kid draped in a blanket.
On all fours pretending to be a lion.
Hunkering over grits at the counter.
Shoving my sisters aside.
A swollen stomach of grief. Missing mom.
Too dark for a new moon.
I suppose.
Holding the shovel the shovel holds me.
In its own way a blessing.
To bend to the corner of the earth.
Creating new doors, new holes.
You look at me in my dumpy sweater.
I hold your hand and really try to see.
The blueberries have no dew.
Like a good kid I pray at the foot of my bed.
My ribcage made of many bars.
The tub its own world.
That I sink into.
Where I become a gray song.

I throw myself over my back like a hostage …

One night I became so cold that my teeth cracked.
I ate them. I saw the way you looked at me.
I picked my fingernails until you turned away.
Something in my gut tells me how long I can soak and swim.
I pull out my pockets. A mint. A faded dollar bill. Yellow shoelace.
My sister wants a house with a garden on the roof.
“Where the hell are your shoes,” you say.
And I might scream too because that’s just how I am.
The preacher says, “Don’t go searching for angels. They will come to you.”
Behind the twisted branches. I was a beautiful woman.
But I thought my eyes unequal.
Like something left unsaid appears to be beautiful.
The whole arm and finally all the parts.
Now I’m a man. All at once I grew a beard.
The best way to get out of quicksand is to throw your whole body into it.
It’s okay to avoid arguments.
What part is the soul?
And my forehead is greasy.
I’m in love with the mummy waiting by the back door.
I’m trying on all the hats.
This one and this one.
I’m pointing at everyone’s face and laughing lipstick.
Like some popular exorcism.
And the women in my head are screaming.
As the men hold them down with axes.
And the moon is full in the way all moons are full.
The suitors are so tired.
They’re weeping into their hands.
And I’m clutching my red diamond so close. I can feel it.
It’s something they need.

This is the year the horses swam but never came back …

The pond could be better if drained in a moment of creation.
Mud sloughing off itself to make more mud.
I pick up sticks after a storm.
There are enough to fill my wheelbarrow.
My wheelbarrow is so small.
My hat tight on my head.
There is consumption in the deepest part of my stomach.
A fake wisdom.
I cover myself with blood before the battle begins.
But it dries and falls off.
There’s a knife in my pocket.
But I don’t know how to use the tools I’m given.
Mouth dump open.
I drink from my glass with both hands.
I come into my own body.
Don’t be afraid.
Am I going to hell?
I’m building my own special church.
Lightning flickering without sound.
I look up and down and sway.
I’m a dinosaur in my bed.
Meaning I rub my belly when full.
A friend once said that I need to work out my legs.
Hundreds of lives within one life.
Too much for any one person.
My dog will wake when he wakes.
There’s no pushing him.
I would like to arrive but not stay.
I would like to be constantly at the door.
Horses gallop in my forehead as I sleep.
All the leaves fall outside the window.
A turtle bumps into a bass and the bass moves on.
Mountains push deeper into the earth.
A whiskey-eyed father slips out the cabin door before his daughter wakes.
Stares into the hard eye of morning.

Rushing Pittman is a transgender man from Alabama. His writing has appeared in jubilat, The Boiler, BOOTH, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bodega, and other various journals. He is the author of the chapbooks Mad Dances for Mad Kings (Factory Hollow Press, 2015) and There Is One Crow That Will Not Stop Cawing (Another New Calligraphy, 2016). He earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is an editor for Biscuit Hill, an online poetry journal. 

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